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Alpidio Rolón, Board Member

Veteran and Advocate

The needs of the blind of Puerto Rico are legion. With the support of the membership of the National Federation of the Blind of Puerto Rico, this board member has made it his personal mission to lead his affiliate to work for improved and modernized opportunities for education, employment, and daily life for all blind people in this somewhat isolated part of the United States. Now on the national board, he is expanding his work to include improved opportunities for all blind people nationwide.

Alpidio Rolón, the only child of Marcela García and Alpidio Rolón, was born on June 20, 1949, in New York City. Seven years later his family moved back to Puerto Rico, where he has lived since 1956. He volunteered for service in the Army in July 1969, completed basic and advanced infantry training, then was sent to Vietnam in January of 1970. A rifle-propelled grenade that blew up in front of him blinded him on April 7, 1970. Three weeks later young Rolón was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he learned basic orientation and mobility skills and was treated for perforated eardrums caused by the exploding grenade. He later spent six months at the Central Blind Rehabilitation Center of the Hines Veterans Administration Hospital in Chicago. There he learned the blindness skills that would permit him to live independently.

Rolón graduated magna cum laude from the University of Puerto Rico in 1976, obtaining a bachelor's degree in liberal arts with an Hispanic Studies major. Continuing his interest in Hispanic studies at the master's level, he completed both courses and comprehensive test requirements. At the University of Puerto Rico be began advocating for the rights of blind people. Although he had belonged to other blind consumer organizations, he says that it wasn't until 1991-when he became part of the NFB of Puerto Rico organizing committee-that he began to believe that he could really do something worthwhile to help the blind, that joining the National Federation of the Blind was like coming home. Rolón was first elected as treasurer of the NFB of Puerto Rico in 1992 and has served as its president since 1996. He was elected to the board of directors of the National Federation of the Blind in July of 2006.

Rolón has combined his love of Spanish and his commitment to the National Federation of the Blind by translating NFB materials into Spanish. He was first motivated to do so when he heard Dr. Kenneth Jernigan's speech "On the Nature of Independence" at the NFB national convention in 1993, in Dallas, Texas. He has since translated other speeches and Braille Monitor articles, served as a real-time translator of banquet speeches at national conventions, and edited inspirational personal stories of the kind that appear in the NFB Kernel Books, written by members of the National Federation of the Blind of Puerto Rico.

Alpidio Rolón is the president of the Society of Friends of the Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped of Puerto Rico. In that capacity he has guided the Society into producing Braille and recorded books in Spanish for blind children in Puerto Rico. To further his goal of improving educational opportunities for blind children, he serves as secretary of the Special Education Advisory Panel for the Puerto Rico Department of Education.